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    us to believe , that Shakspeare , though he painted so faithfully and fearfully the storms of passion , was a calm and cheerful man . The passions are too engrossed by their objects to meditate on themselves ; and none are more ignorant of theiir growth and subtile workings than their own victims . Nothing reveals to us the secrets of our own souls like religion ; and in disclosing to us , in ourselves , the tendency of passion to absorb

    every energy , and to spread its hues over every thought , it gives us a key to all souls ; for in all , human nature is essentially one , having the same spiritual elements , and the same grand features . No man , it is believed , understands the wild and irregular motions of the mind , like him in whom a principle of divine order has begun to establish peace : No man knows the horror of thick darkness which gathers over the slaves of vehement passion , like him who is rising into the light and

    dignity of virtue . There is indeed a selfish shrewdness , which is thought to give a peculiar and deep insight into human nature . But the knowledge of which it boasts is partial , distorted , and vulgar , and wholly unfit for the purposes of literature . We value it little . We believe that no qualification avails so much to a knowledge of human nature in all its forms , in its good and evil manifestations , as that enlightened , celestial charity which religion alone inspires ; for this establishes sympathies

    between us and all men , and thus makes them intelligible to us . A man imbued with this spirit alone contemplates vice , as it really exists , and as it ought always to be described . In the most depraved fellowbeings , he sees partakers of his own nature . Amidst the terrible ravages of i \ ie passions , he sees conscience , though prostrate , not destroyed nor wholly powerless . He sees the proofs of an unextinguished moral life , in inward struggles , in occasional relentings , in sighings for lost innocence , in reviving throbs of early affections , in the sophistry

    by which the guilty mind would become reconciled to itself , in remorse , in anxious forebodings , in despair , perhaps in studied recklessness and cherished eelf-forgetfulness . These conflicts between the passions and the moral nature , are the most interesting subjects ia the branch of literature to which we refer , and we believe that to portray them with truth and power , the man of genius can find in nothing such effectual aid , as in the developement of the moral and religious principles in his own breast . *

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    404 Plato ' s Dialogues ; the Pharlrus .

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    THE PH ^ DRUS . This is the most miscellaneous of all the longer dialogues of Plato . The subjects on which il touches are very numerous , and are held together by a very alight thread of connexion . It is not a controversial

    dialogue , part of it being in long discourses , while even in the part which consists of conversations , Socrates does not combat the opinion of Ph » dru 9 , but states his own . None of the works of Plato tends more strongly to confirm the opinion , that the design of his speculations was rather to recommend a particular mode of inquiry , than to inculcate particular conclusions . Whatever in this dialogue has reference to methods of philosophizing * ( which is the case with a great and the

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    NOTES OS SOME OF THE MORE POPULAR DIALOGUES OF PLATO . No . II .

• Citation
  • Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), June 2, 1834, page 404, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2634/page/22/